


Another Girl's Paradise

by thuvia ptarth (thuviaptarth)



Category: Alias
Genre: F/F, Femslash Challenge, Femslash2004
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-03-02
Updated: 2004-03-02
Packaged: 2017-10-02 20:25:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thuviaptarth/pseuds/thuvia%20ptarth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>what i want/is not to want/what isn't mine</p>
            </blockquote>





	Another Girl's Paradise

**Author's Note:**

> Lauren/Sydney for the Femslash 04 challenge.

It's Switzerland and it's Zürich and it's the Bellerive, but it could be any country, any city, any bar. She's timeless, she really is: look at those long long legs, those downturned eyes, the curve of her mouth; look at those graceful fingers toying with a swizzle stick as if it were a man's heart. She looks nothing like the pictures in Michael's apartment, and nothing like the photo in her Agency personnel file. Lauren recognizes her instantly.

Not Sydney Bristow, Lauren reminds herself, Julia Thorne; not Julia Thorne tonight, but Catherine Perrault. Lauren tugs down her blazer, takes a deep breath, and strides forward.

"Hi!" Bright smile, too bright, she can feel it stretching her face into a mask. "Do you mind if I --" She pulls the empty chair out. "I hate being alone in a strange place, and I saw another woman, and I thought, well, perhaps you could use some company too, but ..."

The flustered confusion isn't as much of a put-on as she'd like. Sydney is gazing at her with the same faint contempt the popular girls always turned on her, at whatever new school went with Daddy's latest assignment. She's wearing a diamond choker and a little black dress exposes more than it hides and leaves her looking untouchable anyway. She is not dressed anything like a woman expecting to spend the evening alone.

"I'm sorry, are you waiting for someone? I do apologize--"

"No, no, please sit." French accent. Parisian even. Everyone told her Sydney was good. "You only startled me. I too am alone and would welcome the company of another woman." And with more luck than she deserves for such a clumsy overture, Sydney is smiling at her, quite warmly, and gesturing over a waiter. "It is so difficult, being a businesswoman alone in a strange country, no? -- Please, on me, the order." And after the waiter has gone to retrieve Lauren's Cosmopolitan: "The men, they are always, how you say, hitting up you -- hitting on you, yes, thank you, hitting on you, they will not leave you alone."

"Pre-cise-ly." And Lauren's sitting and babbling about European men, how telling them you're married isn't enough for them--oh, no, she was raised in England but she's American, here on business, the contact she's here to interview so difficult (and she's never said a truer word about Sloane, even in his Jonas Salk incarnation), her husband's a school teacher, they haven't been married long--

The waiter deposits her Cosmo on the table. It is ostentatiously pink. Lauren pokes at it with her swizzle stick and giggles. "It is rather a girly drink, isn't it?"

For a moment she thinks she's gone too far. But Sydney reaches across the table to catch her hand, tilt her wedding ring so it flashes in the light of the floating candle. "Not married long? Your husband must be unhappy that you travel so often."

The heat of the candle flame beats against the back of her hand; Sydney's fingernails are cool and light against the inside of her palm and her thumb is a gentle pressure on her knuckle, just below the ring. Lauren feels like she is standing inside a net of laser-light, perfectly safe so long as she does not move and trip the alarm.

"He misses me, of course. And of course I'll have to transfer to a more settled job when we have children."

Sydney releases her hand. Artless babble takes them through another three drinks, two for Lauren and one for Sydney, and it earns Lauren nothing, no new information at all. Sydney's very good at this, very good at turning the questions on her.

Of course she is.

Lauren doesn't even know what to ask. Even if she can crack the shell of Catherine Perrault, all it will reveal is Julia Thorne. Sydney Bristow isn't smiling across the table at her, her face glowing in the light from the city across Lake Zürich. The Covenant does good work. Sydney Bristow is dead.

It's a pity her ghost won't stop haunting the CIA offices, the Covenant board room, or Lauren's bed.

Lauren orders another drink.

*

This meeting cost Lauren ten thousand dollars, five open-ended favors, and two blow jobs, and she's gotten nothing from it but a mild buzz. Sydney is acting like she's drunker, leaning heavily on her shoulder and breathing in her ear, but Lauren knows better. Still, the cover will make Sydney react slowly.

She makes her move in the elevator: stumbles against Sydney, tugging her arm down so her mouth is in reach. She knows perfectly well that it's confusion rather than desire that makes Sydney hesitate long enough for Lauren to put her hands in intimate places; but confusion doesn't explain exactly why Sydney is kissing her back with tongue, exactly why her hips are bucking against Lauren's belly before she sways back.

"Wait--" Sydney says, her hands clutching Lauren's arms, and there's the accent, even now, oh, she's good. She's good.

"Lauren -- your husband --"

This is, Lauren thinks, the worst possible thing she could do to Michael, and it takes every ounce of her skill to push down the smile and do fluttering closeted hypocritical confusion instead.

"It's not the same," she murmurs into Sydney's neck. "It's not another man," she says before kissing the underside of Sydney's jaw. "I'm just so far from home," she breathes into Sydney's cleavage, "aren't you?" Sydney makes a surprised ragged sound when Lauren suckles her breast.

"Not here," Sydney manages, and Lauren pulls her head down to kiss her slow and deep before letting her go long enough for Sydney to guide her to her room. Sydney's hands are trembling as she fishes out the card key and Lauren thinks that might just be real and has to breath in and out very slowly in order to maintain control of herself. Once inside, Sydney hesitates.

Slow will make her back out of it, but so will pushy. You're naïve, Lauren reminds herself, selfish, a bit insensitive. She steps out of her shoes and begins undressing. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see Sydney follow suit, a little stiffly. Lauren sits on the edge of the bed, pats her thighs, and smiles at Sydney as if she hasn't noticed anything at all wrong. Slowly, Sydney kneels.

She hesitates, just barely, before lowering her head to Lauren's belly and giving her bellybutton a very delicate and tentative lick, and Lauren knows with a rush of triumph that whatever else Sydney's done, she hasn't done this, she hasn't gone down on a woman before, this is something Lauren knows and Sydney doesn't. It's the thrill of that and not Sydney's tongue that makes her hips buck and her thighs part.

Sydney kisses her belly again, and Lauren twists her hands in Sydney's hair and pulls just enough to sting. "No, darling. Not there. Lower."

Sydney's hands tighten on her thighs, and she raises her head and glares at Lauren with naked dislike. Her cheeks are flushed, but not with arousal, and her lipstick isn't even mussed yet.

Lauren doesn't exert the slightest pressure and she doesn't let go, and she meets Sydney's gaze as if she's a stranger, chance-met in a bar for a one-night stand. "Eat me," she says hoarsely. "Eat my cunt."

Sydney swallows. Lowers her head and backs down. Her hands are hot and damp on Lauren's thighs, and then her mouth is is blessedly wet, cool in contrast to Lauren's feverish heat. She brushes her fingers lightly up and down the back of Lauren's thighs as she licks, the way Michael did before Lauren taught him what she liked better, and Lauren thinks: He learned it from her and gasps just as if Sydney were doing this right.

"Harder," Lauren pants, "use your fingers, oh God, please --"

She pokes her fingers into Lauren roughly, jerks her hand up and down as she licks around the clit. The pressure, which she probably means as resentment, is good, but she is still awful at this. She keeps losing the rhythm as she tries to focus on licking and finally Lauren pulls Sydney's hand out and replaces it with her own.

"Keep licking," she orders, and Sydney does, kneading Lauren's thighs with slick strong fingers, such strong hands, if only she could use them right. God, this hurts her wrist, she should have just taken her vibrator out of her purse, but the pressure and the wetness and her own hand do their work, and she's going to --

"Ss--" and she turns it into a hiss at the last minute. "Catherine. Look at me."

And she's looking straight into that flushed face, that wet mouth, those dark blank eyes, when she comes.

*

Sydney's turn goes better, if Lauren does say so herself, although she's honestly not sure if it's an especial skill or just a fetish Michael never hinted at: Sydney tensing at the cool slide of Lauren's wedding ring against her clit or later Lauren's fingers inside Sydney's mouth, Sydney sucking on the ring like a baby on a pacifier as Lauren finger-fucked her with her other hand. Or maybe Michael never knew; maybe this is a taste of Julia's that Sydney never had.

She falls asleep after she comes, Sydney or Julia or Catherine, which saves Lauren the bother of a good-bye. She has what she wanted: she has something of Sydney Bristow that no one else does, not even Sydney herself.

And that's enough, Lauren tells herself on the flight back to L.A.; that's enough, Lauren tells herself as she smiles and kisses her husband hello. It keeps her sane, she depends upon it to keep her sane, back in Los Angeles, back in the CIA offices among Sydney's friends, back in the Covenant meetings among Sydney's worshippers, back on her back in Michael Vaughn's bed. No matter how lost she feels, she's not nearly as lost as Sydney Bristow is.


End file.
